


Heedless.

by fearless_seas



Series: Thirteen Years. [4]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Kissing, M/M, Minor Character Death, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 10:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15410604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearless_seas/pseuds/fearless_seas
Summary: (a) showing a reckless lack of care or attention.





	Heedless.

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter is dedicated to Antoine because they finally got off their ass and read everything they needed to catch up on (thanks, bitch, I love you).

**\----- 1985 -----**

**April 21st**

 

          It is true, he finds, that intense passion makes not only your soul sing, but makes one seem to glow. Alain shakes the rain drops off of his forehead and struggles to slip his wet overalls off of his body. There is a tv playing in the corner of the garage and a few mechanics are gathered about the box viewing the podium celebration. He wonders for a moment, manages to pull his clothes back on and makes his way towards the machine. For a moment he holds his breath but he cannot exactly figure out why. That is when Ayrton stumbles his way onto the top step of the podium with his fists raised high in the air. Alain blinks and struggles to make the corner of his mouth come down. Maybe it is the weather but seeing the Brazilian stand there with a first place trophy tugs at a certain place deep within him.

          “What are you so happy over?”, Alain spins around and Niki is postulated there with his hands on his hips and goosebumps covering his arms.

          He shrugs, “Nothing.” He turns back towards the screen just as the champagne is being sprayed. “You think he is going to be big?”, he asks and he is not normally one to ask questions about these sorts of things. Alain mostly expects a dark remark or sarcastic bite from Niki but instead they pause pensively and peer at the television.

          “I suppose so.”

          He believes it when he thinks that he would of much rather been able to witness it person. There is a certain languid quality in how the rain mixes with the spray of alcohol. A part of him wondered if he ever looked that beautiful when he was celebrating.

 _I know so_.

          Ayrton strolls his way up the pit lane twenty minutes later. Alain waves to him, flashes a thumbs up and then moves away. For a moment he could see him in the corner of his eye, standing there as if wondering if he should talk to him or not. Ultimately he moved on, traveling with a short smile.

 

__________________________

**October 21st**

  


          It scares him. Deep inside. Those clouded thoughts that creep towards him, dwell in the most shadowed corner of ever racer’s mind. It preys and feeds upon your sanity in the acceptance of death. Alain knows this, he steps foot into his car and places his hands on the wheel. Everytime a little piece of himself says, before he puts his visor down: _this may be it_. Nelson feels it too, just as every driver does. One night Nelson had to much to drink, he wasn’t smashed to be exact, but taken out quite a bit. There was an occurrence in this blind apex of slurred speech, a second of clarity. He looks to him, sitting up suddenly and his eyelids are rigid, blown calmly and he has stopped jittering.

          “Does it not fuck you up?”, Nelson mutters, closing his eyes and leaning over the table in the booth. Alain disregards him and instead checks his watch, searching for an exit in case Nelson’s stomach hurls on him. “Does it not?”, he repeats, pressing his fingers firmly in Alain’s arm.

          Alain’s eyes attend to the whitened knuckles attached to his arm. “What are you talking about?”

          “The acceptance,” Nelson notes, his voice tone dropping considerably, “That we have to accept that we will die in the car.”

          But Alain doesn’t know if he’s ever thought of it so much as this. Instead he rips Nelson up from his seat, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” He leans him on his shoulder and wheels him out.

          Nelson throws up out the window of the car and Alain has to pull over. He waits until Nelson has wiped a hand across his mouth before he switches the car back on. They are starting to fall asleep against the passenger side window a few moments later. “It frightens me, Alain,” he whispers, his eyes rolling shut, “For you, I am scared for you.” Before he can reply, he has fallen asleep with their face curled up like a child.

          These words resonate in him. He swallows, wrings his hands on the steering wheel and sets his jaw. Out of the corner of his eye he observes the oncoming headlights flash and coil themselves across Nelson’s face, around the edges and  soft lines of his expression and his unsteady, rough hands. When the car stops he turns the key and peers to his right where they are laying. Alain studies him a little closer now, before every race, observes his smile. He thinks: _it might be the last time_. He imprints it into his brain, their issues and features just as he knows Nelson does too.

 _For you_.

          He ponders it over the next couple of days. At the start in Monaco, Alain didn’t know who had crashed or who had been involved. After the podium celebration, he learns it. A little instance of panic seizes him, one that makes his run his fingernails into the palm of his hand.

          “Is Nelson okay?”, he questions Niki who shrugs slyly while grumbling underneath his breath. Because he doesn’t know anything, he does one thing quietly that he knows how to do well: worry. A few possibilities swim in his mind until he is pointed to the back of the Brabham garage where Nelson has his head hanging in between his knees. Alain slides a hand over his shoulder, soothes the tremble in his shoulders until they are able to look him in the eyes. “Are you alright?”

          Nelson steals a large breath that hitches in the center, hiccups in his throat. “Yes,” his response is slow, almost thoughtful. They close their eyes again and allow their head to sink back down with a decompression of their shoulders. Alain doesn’t say anything more, he only slips down the wall until he is sitting next to him and their thighs link together.

          “You’ll be okay.”

          Nelson sighs, “I know.”

          Alain beholds him from the side, the in-and-out of air and the quiver on hum lips. In a way he wants to stay like this, tangled and restless in depths that holds itself in strict suspense. He wonders what he would be doing right now if he wasn’t next to him. Their presence is too large to ever be absent from his conscious. He understands that. He does.

 

_________________________

**August 18th**

  


          Alain was concerned in a way, that it would happen like this. So, when Nelson eventually does ask him after years of Alain being grateful he hadn’t had to say no yet, it occurs.

          “You should spend the winter with me,” Nelson is laying on his back with his eyes to the ceiling and his hands behind his head. “It is fucking cold in Europe, you could use more sun.” Alain only hums as he senses the weight from the other side of the bed shift when Nelson stands up.

          Alain doesn’t regard at him. “And why should I do that?”, he inquires, facing towards the wall.

          “It will be good for us, I could take you out on my boat and--”

 _Us_. Alain scoffs and sits up to follow him. Nelson pauses like a deer in headlights at this sound like he finds himself caught guilty and frightened in the center of something larger. “We would end up killing each other like dogs,” he shakes his head.

          “Or,” Nelson draws towards the balcony, “We could fuck for several months, I’d kill that tight little ass of yours.”

          “But we already do,” he insists.

          “Yes, but--”

          “--I have a wife in my bed at home,” he waves his hand in the air. “This is only a seasonal thing, this…”, he recesses, “...thing between us.”

          “It seems you only like me with my dick up your ass,” Nelson mutters, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his fingers together in his lap.

          “Mostly, yes.”

          Alain falls asleep after Nelson leaves. A winter with Nelson Piquet, what a stupid idea.

 

__________________________

**September 2nd**

  


          The word arrives with stern, fluid phone call to his home in Switzerland. It only causes him to swallow tightly and place the phone slowly back on the receiver. He falls into a wooden chair at the kitchen table that is already pulled out. The early morning sun is drawing across the sky and the day has the scent of unexpected things. The shine that shifts itself over his hands through the drapes reminds him off their hair and the glow of the blue sky over emerald trees give the impression of his eyes. The newspapers make it worse a day later when their picture is plastered over the front page with their name in bold letters. He throws it away and spends the rest of the day locked in his study, studying the colors of them mark the scene.

          “He was so young,” Alain muses and presses the pads of his fingers deep into his temples to relieve the dark thoughts fostering themselves there.

          Nelson lays on the motorhome bed, watching him and when the magnitude of these words impress themself upon him, he simple rolls his head in the other direction to hide his face. He doesn’t say anything, only tightens his mouth as if to twist the pain up into a little ball and toss it in the bin in the corner of the room.

          “They were all young, everyone of them; shit happens.”

          Alain cannot find anything more to say so he thinks of Stefan for a few more days until slowly but surely they slip, slip out of his memory and thoughts like a grain of sand in a tall hourglass.

 

_____________________

**November 3rd**

  


          There isn’t a single feeling in the world like this. Not one. It was everything since he was fourteen materializing in front of his eyes. It feels long, long overdue. Championship winning champagne does taste a lot sweeter, he gets to find this out.

          “What did I tell you?”, Nelson stretches an arm around his shoulders after the championship podium is finished.

          Alain narrows his brows but he is too much elated to care. “What _did_ you tell me?”

          Nelson shrugs, “Well, if you have forgotten maybe it was not important after all.”

          They drink several bottles of wine on the balcony under the starlight. It plays out like a dream until it is four in the morning and Nelson is tossing in and out of sleep on the floor with a sheet wrapped about him. Alain shoots up in bed rubs his forehead.

          “Oh my god,” he stammers out loud, widening his eyes. “Oh, _mon dieu_.” He tumbles out of bed and crawls over to Nelson. It takes a minute of frantically shaking him, running his fingers across his shoulders in an attempt to wake him up. He only frowns in his sleep before slowly opening his eyes.

          “What the fuck?”, Nelson whines, leaning up on an elbow and glaring to Alain (who is kneeling beside him). “What the fuck do you want?”, his hair is flattened down to one side of his head and his eyes are half shut.

          “I am the world champion,” he gasps, leaning over him.

          Nelson groans audibly and falls back onto the carpet, “You woke me up for that? To fucking brag in my face?” He shuts his eyes and grabs the sheet up to his neck, “Go back to fucking sleep, Alain.”

          But he is not giving up so he shoves him again with a rough go. “Nelson,” he glares into his eyes, “I am the world champion.”

          Nelson eventually gives up and turns towards him. “What do you want to do about it?”, he asks and for some reason he is behaving oddly awake, blinking his eyes constantly to keep them going.

          Alain’s lips say bigger things that his words ever could. He plants a hand on either side of him and kisses him. It is deep, rough and Nelson reaches a hand behind his neck to push him farther into the interaction. He stares at the bones that lay beneath their flesh, two hands cold as ice pushing up underneath his shirt through to the muscle that beats in the warmth of his touch. But there is a heavy silence about them, exposed and bleeding like a fragile layer of skin. But Nelson is acting as though he wishes to rip his outer sheath away, to feel the deeper things within him and undress his heart. It senses like urgency, as though he has something to say. Alain is scared, he is frightened of the things he knows are there. He kisses him and kisses him to trap the words back in their mouth, to make sure they never fall revealed into open air. He suffocates him, starves him until he forgets he ever wished to say it.

          These moments are small; they are like lightning crashing through the thunder of a storm. Alain yearns to hide beneath the covers and they are begging him to come out and dance in the rain. A momentum of extravagant implications falls upon them both. A troubling game, it is. He pulls away, smiles and goes back to lay on the bed. He lays awake and stares at the wall, reminds himself that he is a world champion. Below he hears Nelson shifting about on the floor and Alain pretends to be asleep; pretends that he doesn’t hear them playing their thoughts out on the ceiling below him.

**Author's Note:**

> As per usual, any questions just em' to me on Tumblr @pieregasly 
> 
> Thanks for reading! I read every comment and respond so if you liked it, please tell me :)


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